Acme Novelty Datebook Volume Two: 1995 - 2002 - Hardcover

Ware, Chris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1897299184 ISBN 13: 9781897299180

Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly, 2007

Synopsis

Straggling behind the mild 2003 success of cartoonist Chris Ware's first facsimile collection of his miscellaneous sketches, notes, and adolescent fantasies arrives this second volume, updating weary readers with Ware's clichéd and outmoded insights from the late twentieth century.

Working directly in pen and ink, watercolor, and white-out whenever he makes a mistake, Ware has cannily edited out all legally sensitive and personally incriminating material from his private journals, carefully recomposing each page to simulate the appearance of an ordered mind and established aesthetic directive. All phone numbers, references to ex-girlfriends, "false starts," and embarrassing experiments with unfamiliar drawing media have been generously excised to present the reader with the most pleasant and colorful sketchbook reading experience available. Included are Ware's frustrated doodles for his book covers, angry personal assaults on friends, half-finished comic strips, and lengthy and tiresome fulminations of personal disappointments both social and sexual, as well as his now-beloved drawings of the generally miserable inhabitants of the city of Chicago. All in all, a necessary volume for fans of fine art, water-based media, and personal diatribe. This hardcover is attractively designed and easy to resell.

About this title

About the Author:

Chris Ware is the author of Jimmy Corrigan-the Smartest Kid on Earth, which received the Guardian First Book Award and was featured in the Whitney Biennial. A regular contributor to The New Yorker and the first cartoonist to be serialized weekly in The New York Times Magazine, he is the editor of the thirteenth issue of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and the Gasoline Alley archival series Walt & Skeezix. Ware was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1967 and currently lives in the Chicago area with his wife, Marnie, and their daughter, Clara.

From Booklist:

Alternative-comics artist Ware reveals the impressive technical skills and thought processes behind his acclaimed graphic novels in a second collection of his sketchbook pages. The handsomely designed volume gathers hundreds of portraits, watercolors, unfinished comics pages, and other artwork. Life drawings with detailed shading display a radically different style from the simple line-work of Jimmy Corrigan (2000), Ware’s chef d’oeuvre (thus far), while still lifes and cityscapes show the mechanical precision of his comic strips. Cruel self-portraits and strips entitled “I Am Filled with Despair” and “Yesterday Was a Terrible Day” suggest that the harsh worldview of Ware’s graphic novels is more than a literary device for him. --Gordon Flagg

About this edition

• Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1897299184
• ISBN 13: 9781897299180
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208